I know this is just an anecdote, but at my church everyone has kids. And so all the newlyweds start having kids right away. I suspect from this experience that childbirth is surprisingly sensitive to peer pressure.
The fundamental problem is that one party has become the pro-birth party and the other has become the anti-birth party. This is because married middle class people (especially with 3+ kids) have become solidly republican, while the Democratic Party is the party of poor single moms, non-straight people, and low fertility professional urban women. With some additional support from people employed in the Eds and Meds racket.
So the lefts fertility policy usually amounts to means tested giveaways to poor single moms and additional funding for Baumol's cost disease Eds and Meds rackets that don't return much value.
The right in theory should be pushing huge tax breaks for middle class married couples with multiple kids, but it can't seem to get the message.
I'm skeptical we will get bi-partisanship on this because of the policy differences, but I'll take whatever tax breaks I can get.
It's interesting that you say that, because to me, child tax credits are mostly and traditionally a liberal / left-wing thing. It was Senate Republicans that voted down a child tax credit expansion in August.
Refundable child tax credits with income phase outs are a liberal/left thing. That's just welfare for poor single moms.
Conservative child tax credits would scale with income, no phase out, and reward marriage.
Voting down liberal left child tax credits is a conservative thing to do. They subsidize bad births (poor single moms) and do little to nothing to raise good births (married middle class).
JDVance's call for a $5k credit with no income phase out is probably the absolute minimum level of conservative child tax credit, but something based on payroll taxes would be better.
I disagree. My proposed Working Family Tax Credit can easily be funded by rolling back mean-tested social programs. The proposal is not designed to increase fertility, but if the author of this article is correct, it might have that effect.
Fertility incentives seem like they could turn into another war on poverty, where we end up spending a lot of money that we don't want to quit spending because it is making some difference but we never seem to be able to spend enough to solve the problem. I'd like to see more discussion of revenue positive incentives.
As an example, I propose: Cap the mortgage interest deduction, but make the cap depend on how many minor kids you have at home. This policy would have no effect on the poor, while incentivizing the upper middle class to have kids, but the less wealthy wouldn't be paying to incentivize them. Part of the cost would be offset by lower housing prices. We give families with kids an advantage in the housing market over those without, and developers would have an incentive to build for families. Given how much we are exploding the deficit, shouldn't we be looking for options like this?
Looking at it from the ground, there's no good reason to expect these policies to be maintained in the long term. In Australia one party would introduce them, the next election the other party repeals them.
This seems especially likely inasmuch as keeping wages low is elite policy, and if these policies as a side effect tend to put upward pressure on wages that will be a sufficient argument against them. There's also the acute issue of housing access, which greatly increases the margin of men that are considered too poor to support a family, and ever increasing housing prices are the unifying priority of elites. It's not hard to project that fixing fertility will end up requiring a radical collapse.
There's simply no democratic mechanism for the people to set a course and trust it won't be shifted by obscure laws. Pro fertility policies of the magnitude needed aren't something present western governments can credibly promise, and that probably dampens their effect.
"if these policies as a side effect tend to put upward pressure on wages that will be a sufficient argument against them"
Please explain.
Are you suggesting social welfare provision to working age adults puts upward pressure on wages ( ie say by reducing work place participation)? Some would argue this 'subsidy' enables employers to lower the wages they pay. How did the move of women into the formal economy through the '70s and '80s change wage rates? If anything some people argue that rather than affecting wages, it raised single family house prices by enabling a married double income couple to pay more than a single income family (eg red queen race).
You're right and I was being needlessly obscure. I meant to refer to the whole picture presented in the article, particularly that male employment correlates with higher birth rates. But I do also think there's a potential for these subsidies to enable some women to leave the workforce who otherwise have no choice, and this would give men greater bargaining power. The lower pay argument, that employers can pay less, I don't find convincing, though we have protections against that in Australia so I may not understand how wages are able to move down in other countries. My impression is generally inflation eats wages, not pay cuts.
And further, as you point out, women's participation has brought about the two earner household, which is probably incompatible with replacement birthrates. So my point was if taking these proposals seriously lands you in a place where there's upward wage pressure, let alone downward pressure on housing, the project in doomed in Australia's particular political economy at least, and I imagine similar is true of other western countries
Without rereading, is not the effect: "male wealth" (relative to some perceived local/personal optima) leads to (maybe only correlates) with more marriages (resulting in more kids? (ie irrespective of housing costs).
I wasn't suggesting wages would be cut, merely that a government subsidy would reduce pressure for them to rise. This is the same effect as setting a high minimum wage (ie requiring an employer to subsidise low wages) reduces employment.
We're in NZ. We export our kids to you because Australia is perceived as (and is) wealthier.
Interestingly, NZ house prices are about 7 times the average wage according to Perplexity. I thought the multiple was higher. Perplexity provides some suggestion that the multiple is lower in NZ's agricultural provinces compared to our metropolitan areas. ie Families are better off in the South Is than in the North Is even while wages on average are lower. In Auckland the multiple is over 8 times. So a person should leave Aukland when they intend to start a family.
In Australia, Perplexity tells me the multiple for Sydney is about 13 times, though I don't see much evidence of (kiwi origin) Sydneyites returning to NZ to start families. Maybe they move to the GC?
Yeah that's what was in the article, I'd add that generally you're going to have trouble finding a wife without stable employment. Not any kind of rule but I think it's a factor behind the statistics. I think it's equally important that right now the average worker is treated as disposable, and you can't be confident in your income unless you're suited to a narrow band of government employment.
I see what you're saying about the subsidy putting downward pressure on wages, but I think in a situation where women prioritise motherhood, albeit I imagine mixed with more casual work in the ordinary case, the downward pressure operates on a per household rather than per worker basis, and is negated by the woman leaving the workforce, or at least careers. The husband then on net still requires a higher wage to cover the loss, and the overall workforce is reduced, which combine to mean upward wage pressure.
I've never been to NZ (one day!) but my impression is there's simply not enough work to go around. We have highly controlled wages in Australia also, probably to the same depressive effect, except that we do have mining industry which naturally pays a lot more, and this competition with other industries forces wages upward, so the higher wages aren't that out of line with the natural level. Unfortunately Henry George was a prophet and the gain is being eaten up by returns to land, which I think will destroy the country in the next decade or so, since it's virtually impossible to create a new centre of population in Australia, the great cities have too much control to permit it. You might be seeing more young people returning soon.
A few general comments: I'm semi-retired with (unpaired) kids in their 20's so I'm thinking about how they can best/most easily establish themselves.
I married without a reliable income ie that did not deter my wife-to-be as she married 'on potential'. I think women are still somewhat the same. However, from the time I thought we would marry I did take the first job offered that provided a reliable income. That was because we intended to have kids promptly and I felt I needed to de-risk the household income supply. I then focused more on being promoted (rather than on 'speculative' money making 'bets') ie I felt family responsibilities.
I don't think the morality of the job market has changed much over my working life. NZ, when I started, was highly unionised then work was transformed by the neoliberal reforms of the 1980's, though the move of women into the workforce has rather returned it now to a highly regulated state somewhat like when I started. Just more 'feminine' now than the 'masculine' of then. When I started it was a struggle between physical worker vs owner boss. Now its a struggle about what is fair and unfair.
Oz is very lucky with its mineral wealth. The people would be a lot poorer without it. I suspect that wealth is being squandered. A bit like the UK with its oil (not that I have much on which to base that judgement).
Perhaps George's land tax could reduce red queen races around housing costs. I actually had to check wikipedia to see that he was associated with taxing unimproved land. I really can't comment on its merits.
I envy you that life, I'm near 30 and only just getting my act together. I don't mean to ascribe anything to any given person, just that some women have upfront financial expections, and I'd imagine it shows up in the birthrate statistics when there's a deficit of men with means, and increasingly also prospects.
It might interest you to know my theory of declining birth rates, at least in Australia, and I do think it'll be different in every country.
Nearly every girl who doesn't marry out of high school moves into the cities, often leaving the country boys with little prospects if they're not lucky. In hustle bustle women have an easier time finding casual work and making the rent, and seem to more readily accept the blunt exploitation, losing half to the landlord. Careers in the city also favour women to my observation.
Further, a woman's datability is inherent, she just has to show up as a baseline if she's attractive. I'm not saying they don't want to do more, but if they can't it's not catastrophic. Men on the other hand need excess resources for courtship, and this they don't have if they just keep up with the ladies. The rent, per George, always rises to subsistence levels, eating up any income gains on the average, and without dating options outside the city, where new land might be opened up, this is inescapable without already having a partner, who is often used to the city by the time you get together.
Certainly many women would accept the new baseline over time, dating norms adjust, except the situation tends to grade on the men, they're captives in an indifferent world, unable to get out. Altogether it makes the men antisocial, pessimistic, they stay at home too long, and that's just not an attractive way to be. They become undateable.
So the ladies have a reduced pool on top of a baseline gender imbalance in the city, which holds the keys to an active dating life in Australia. The attractive and lucky minority of men have leverage, they can be cruel and exploitative and get away with it. The worst often sleep with the most women. I know a couple of these types as friends, they can be good people but by some oddity of their psychology they don't see what they're doing to the ladies in their life (and it looks like they'll end up alone for it). Commitment has been branded as servitude, justifying extended adolescence, preventing women demanding it forthrightly if that's what they want. I even think there's a level of cope, they get rejected when they push in an early relationship, then rationalise that they never wanted them or anyone else in the first place.
The result of that is a low view of men, who they feel entitled to mistreat in kind. Men and women then have a bifurcated cultural base, which you see glaringly online. Women come on and talk of men in a very distorted frame of reference, which in turns makes the men think they're mercurial and impossible to please, and feeds their antisocial tendencies. The feedback loop is amplified by social media, which is eating away our lives.
Mind you life is strange and varied, I know many exceptions in all directions, but I'm speaking here to the general trend, the reason why people couple late or not at all at the scale of society. As best I can tell, the city in Australia is a trap and is eating it's people alive, excepting the landed few. I don't expect the situation to improve until strategies are devised to move out and claim new lands for new cultural centres.
This is one of those "Many must die, so more might live" issues. A lot of people would consider these programs 1. If they're PMC, a threat to their own kids. 2. They precieve a threat to their current benefits, the elderly with taxpayer paid health care.
I know this is just an anecdote, but at my church everyone has kids. And so all the newlyweds start having kids right away. I suspect from this experience that childbirth is surprisingly sensitive to peer pressure.
The fundamental problem is that one party has become the pro-birth party and the other has become the anti-birth party. This is because married middle class people (especially with 3+ kids) have become solidly republican, while the Democratic Party is the party of poor single moms, non-straight people, and low fertility professional urban women. With some additional support from people employed in the Eds and Meds racket.
So the lefts fertility policy usually amounts to means tested giveaways to poor single moms and additional funding for Baumol's cost disease Eds and Meds rackets that don't return much value.
The right in theory should be pushing huge tax breaks for middle class married couples with multiple kids, but it can't seem to get the message.
I'm skeptical we will get bi-partisanship on this because of the policy differences, but I'll take whatever tax breaks I can get.
It's interesting that you say that, because to me, child tax credits are mostly and traditionally a liberal / left-wing thing. It was Senate Republicans that voted down a child tax credit expansion in August.
Refundable child tax credits with income phase outs are a liberal/left thing. That's just welfare for poor single moms.
Conservative child tax credits would scale with income, no phase out, and reward marriage.
Voting down liberal left child tax credits is a conservative thing to do. They subsidize bad births (poor single moms) and do little to nothing to raise good births (married middle class).
JDVance's call for a $5k credit with no income phase out is probably the absolute minimum level of conservative child tax credit, but something based on payroll taxes would be better.
There's no money for big tax breaks for parents without cuts to old age spending
There is no money for old age spending without young people to pay for it.
Anyway, I've run the math before and the money is there if there is the will. You just need higher payroll taxes on the childless.
We would need significantly higher levels of taxation to pay for the amount of benefits already promised
That's why we have many trillions in unfunded.Entitlement liabilities
How are they going to get any less unfunded without children to pay for them?
But that's not gonna help for twenty years
Social security is facing a twenty percent cut in seven years
What cuts is it facing in twenty years if the dependency ratio continues to deteriorate? Thirty years? Forty years? Fifty years?
I disagree. My proposed Working Family Tax Credit can easily be funded by rolling back mean-tested social programs. The proposal is not designed to increase fertility, but if the author of this article is correct, it might have that effect.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-case-for-a-working-family-tax
Destroy feminism and family law.
Men have no reason to have children that are the property of the state and the hostage of the mother.
Fertility incentives seem like they could turn into another war on poverty, where we end up spending a lot of money that we don't want to quit spending because it is making some difference but we never seem to be able to spend enough to solve the problem. I'd like to see more discussion of revenue positive incentives.
As an example, I propose: Cap the mortgage interest deduction, but make the cap depend on how many minor kids you have at home. This policy would have no effect on the poor, while incentivizing the upper middle class to have kids, but the less wealthy wouldn't be paying to incentivize them. Part of the cost would be offset by lower housing prices. We give families with kids an advantage in the housing market over those without, and developers would have an incentive to build for families. Given how much we are exploding the deficit, shouldn't we be looking for options like this?
Poor single moms are anti-birth? Is your definition of “mom” different from mine?
Tier One Chinese cities provide free IVF.
Looking at it from the ground, there's no good reason to expect these policies to be maintained in the long term. In Australia one party would introduce them, the next election the other party repeals them.
This seems especially likely inasmuch as keeping wages low is elite policy, and if these policies as a side effect tend to put upward pressure on wages that will be a sufficient argument against them. There's also the acute issue of housing access, which greatly increases the margin of men that are considered too poor to support a family, and ever increasing housing prices are the unifying priority of elites. It's not hard to project that fixing fertility will end up requiring a radical collapse.
There's simply no democratic mechanism for the people to set a course and trust it won't be shifted by obscure laws. Pro fertility policies of the magnitude needed aren't something present western governments can credibly promise, and that probably dampens their effect.
"if these policies as a side effect tend to put upward pressure on wages that will be a sufficient argument against them"
Please explain.
Are you suggesting social welfare provision to working age adults puts upward pressure on wages ( ie say by reducing work place participation)? Some would argue this 'subsidy' enables employers to lower the wages they pay. How did the move of women into the formal economy through the '70s and '80s change wage rates? If anything some people argue that rather than affecting wages, it raised single family house prices by enabling a married double income couple to pay more than a single income family (eg red queen race).
You're right and I was being needlessly obscure. I meant to refer to the whole picture presented in the article, particularly that male employment correlates with higher birth rates. But I do also think there's a potential for these subsidies to enable some women to leave the workforce who otherwise have no choice, and this would give men greater bargaining power. The lower pay argument, that employers can pay less, I don't find convincing, though we have protections against that in Australia so I may not understand how wages are able to move down in other countries. My impression is generally inflation eats wages, not pay cuts.
And further, as you point out, women's participation has brought about the two earner household, which is probably incompatible with replacement birthrates. So my point was if taking these proposals seriously lands you in a place where there's upward wage pressure, let alone downward pressure on housing, the project in doomed in Australia's particular political economy at least, and I imagine similar is true of other western countries
Without rereading, is not the effect: "male wealth" (relative to some perceived local/personal optima) leads to (maybe only correlates) with more marriages (resulting in more kids? (ie irrespective of housing costs).
I wasn't suggesting wages would be cut, merely that a government subsidy would reduce pressure for them to rise. This is the same effect as setting a high minimum wage (ie requiring an employer to subsidise low wages) reduces employment.
We're in NZ. We export our kids to you because Australia is perceived as (and is) wealthier.
Interestingly, NZ house prices are about 7 times the average wage according to Perplexity. I thought the multiple was higher. Perplexity provides some suggestion that the multiple is lower in NZ's agricultural provinces compared to our metropolitan areas. ie Families are better off in the South Is than in the North Is even while wages on average are lower. In Auckland the multiple is over 8 times. So a person should leave Aukland when they intend to start a family.
In Australia, Perplexity tells me the multiple for Sydney is about 13 times, though I don't see much evidence of (kiwi origin) Sydneyites returning to NZ to start families. Maybe they move to the GC?
Yeah that's what was in the article, I'd add that generally you're going to have trouble finding a wife without stable employment. Not any kind of rule but I think it's a factor behind the statistics. I think it's equally important that right now the average worker is treated as disposable, and you can't be confident in your income unless you're suited to a narrow band of government employment.
I see what you're saying about the subsidy putting downward pressure on wages, but I think in a situation where women prioritise motherhood, albeit I imagine mixed with more casual work in the ordinary case, the downward pressure operates on a per household rather than per worker basis, and is negated by the woman leaving the workforce, or at least careers. The husband then on net still requires a higher wage to cover the loss, and the overall workforce is reduced, which combine to mean upward wage pressure.
I've never been to NZ (one day!) but my impression is there's simply not enough work to go around. We have highly controlled wages in Australia also, probably to the same depressive effect, except that we do have mining industry which naturally pays a lot more, and this competition with other industries forces wages upward, so the higher wages aren't that out of line with the natural level. Unfortunately Henry George was a prophet and the gain is being eaten up by returns to land, which I think will destroy the country in the next decade or so, since it's virtually impossible to create a new centre of population in Australia, the great cities have too much control to permit it. You might be seeing more young people returning soon.
A few general comments: I'm semi-retired with (unpaired) kids in their 20's so I'm thinking about how they can best/most easily establish themselves.
I married without a reliable income ie that did not deter my wife-to-be as she married 'on potential'. I think women are still somewhat the same. However, from the time I thought we would marry I did take the first job offered that provided a reliable income. That was because we intended to have kids promptly and I felt I needed to de-risk the household income supply. I then focused more on being promoted (rather than on 'speculative' money making 'bets') ie I felt family responsibilities.
I don't think the morality of the job market has changed much over my working life. NZ, when I started, was highly unionised then work was transformed by the neoliberal reforms of the 1980's, though the move of women into the workforce has rather returned it now to a highly regulated state somewhat like when I started. Just more 'feminine' now than the 'masculine' of then. When I started it was a struggle between physical worker vs owner boss. Now its a struggle about what is fair and unfair.
Oz is very lucky with its mineral wealth. The people would be a lot poorer without it. I suspect that wealth is being squandered. A bit like the UK with its oil (not that I have much on which to base that judgement).
Perhaps George's land tax could reduce red queen races around housing costs. I actually had to check wikipedia to see that he was associated with taxing unimproved land. I really can't comment on its merits.
I envy you that life, I'm near 30 and only just getting my act together. I don't mean to ascribe anything to any given person, just that some women have upfront financial expections, and I'd imagine it shows up in the birthrate statistics when there's a deficit of men with means, and increasingly also prospects.
It might interest you to know my theory of declining birth rates, at least in Australia, and I do think it'll be different in every country.
Nearly every girl who doesn't marry out of high school moves into the cities, often leaving the country boys with little prospects if they're not lucky. In hustle bustle women have an easier time finding casual work and making the rent, and seem to more readily accept the blunt exploitation, losing half to the landlord. Careers in the city also favour women to my observation.
Further, a woman's datability is inherent, she just has to show up as a baseline if she's attractive. I'm not saying they don't want to do more, but if they can't it's not catastrophic. Men on the other hand need excess resources for courtship, and this they don't have if they just keep up with the ladies. The rent, per George, always rises to subsistence levels, eating up any income gains on the average, and without dating options outside the city, where new land might be opened up, this is inescapable without already having a partner, who is often used to the city by the time you get together.
Certainly many women would accept the new baseline over time, dating norms adjust, except the situation tends to grade on the men, they're captives in an indifferent world, unable to get out. Altogether it makes the men antisocial, pessimistic, they stay at home too long, and that's just not an attractive way to be. They become undateable.
So the ladies have a reduced pool on top of a baseline gender imbalance in the city, which holds the keys to an active dating life in Australia. The attractive and lucky minority of men have leverage, they can be cruel and exploitative and get away with it. The worst often sleep with the most women. I know a couple of these types as friends, they can be good people but by some oddity of their psychology they don't see what they're doing to the ladies in their life (and it looks like they'll end up alone for it). Commitment has been branded as servitude, justifying extended adolescence, preventing women demanding it forthrightly if that's what they want. I even think there's a level of cope, they get rejected when they push in an early relationship, then rationalise that they never wanted them or anyone else in the first place.
The result of that is a low view of men, who they feel entitled to mistreat in kind. Men and women then have a bifurcated cultural base, which you see glaringly online. Women come on and talk of men in a very distorted frame of reference, which in turns makes the men think they're mercurial and impossible to please, and feeds their antisocial tendencies. The feedback loop is amplified by social media, which is eating away our lives.
Mind you life is strange and varied, I know many exceptions in all directions, but I'm speaking here to the general trend, the reason why people couple late or not at all at the scale of society. As best I can tell, the city in Australia is a trap and is eating it's people alive, excepting the landed few. I don't expect the situation to improve until strategies are devised to move out and claim new lands for new cultural centres.
This is one of those "Many must die, so more might live" issues. A lot of people would consider these programs 1. If they're PMC, a threat to their own kids. 2. They precieve a threat to their current benefits, the elderly with taxpayer paid health care.